Teaching

As an Associate Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Tokyo (since 2012), I regularly offer four courses per semester in the German Department at Hongo Campus. My teaching covers central topics from the early modern period to modernism and seeks to bring students into a genuine dialogue with personalities ranging particularly from Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel and Richard Wagner to Thomas Mann, Alfred Doeblin, and Bertolt Brecht.

Research

In my research I focus on German literature from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. My approach combines the close analysis of texts and other artefacts, mainly films, with an interest in historical concepts of individual and collective identity as well as in the history of theology, sociology and political ideologies.

For my contributions to these fields, I have been awarded, inter alia, a Philip Leverhulme Fellowship and an Einstein Visiting Fellowship.

Support

I am glad to support students of the University of Tokyo who seek contact to universities and other research institutions in the Humanities of German speaking countries. The same applies for students from the Freie Universitaet Berlin as well as scholarship holders of Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes in regard to the University of Tokyo.

Feel free to contact me. And please make the best use of the link list on these websites: it should help you to find your way through the University of Tokyo and selected German research facilities.